1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to business software integration and, more particularly, to an adaptive integration activity management framework for on demand business process integration.
2. Background Description
The emergence of Web Service paves the way for easy integration of various applications from multiple platforms. An example of such business process integration is to use standard interface such as Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) to enable multiple monolithic applications to work together in a loosely coupled but controlled flow to achieve a business goal. However, several problems in business process integration area are observed. One of them is that such actual integration between applications still has to be pre-defined or hard-wired, thus preventing adaptation to new business process integration requirements later on. It is also observed that some of the goals for business process integration are to enable easy integration of legacy and new applications.
In current state-of-the-art application integration, there is no standard. Most of the application systems have been integrated in a dedicated, one-to-one type of scenario via application adaptor. That is, for each new application to be integrated, a dedicated adaptor is developed to enable integration. In addition, there is no reusability, i.e., for each new integration case, the same set of customization is repeated again for the one-of-a-kind integration. Obviously, this kind of approach is labor intensive and does not scale well.
We have identified the challenging issues for the current business process integration as follows:                Lack a uniform representation to capture detailed requirements of each application integration activity, such as method names, input and output parameter formats, etc. for the application to be integrated with. Again, such integrations have been done in dedicated and hard-wired manner.        Lack adaptation in business process integration of a new application. For each new integration activity, considerable amount of programming work has to be done on the middle-ware infrastructure to develop, test and incorporate the new adaptor, and then be able to invoke the new application.        Lack flexibility to support business process integration at a different granularity, i.e. all integrations are fixed and pre-defined for a specific purpose and integration environment.        Lack flexible mechanism to express the conditions between integration activities. For example, above a certain threshold, one integration activity, e.g. FTP (File Transfer Protocol), is to be invoked, otherwise, switch to the other activity, e.g. GridFTP.        